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Are you looking to transform your IT dept or just keep your WordPress plugins up to date? Send me an email and we can talk about how I can support your organization or your Web site.

I am the proud owner of a RepRap 3D printer. Repraps are Open Source 3D printers with the goal of being created entirely out of printable parts.

I have been programming professionally since 2000. I mainly use PHP. I wrote a book on Magento. I worked as an independant PHP contractor for 8 years before working at the digital marketing firm Fire Engine Red. At FER I set up a data warehouse and data visualization tools. I also maintained a legacy PHP application, introduced CI tools and practices to the dev team, and added unit testing and automated browser testing to provide stability to an ancient code base.

See my [portfolio](/portfolio/) page for examples of my work.

Blog Posts

Concurrent Artisan Migrate and other db migrations

September-20

Running phinx or artisan migrate during a deployment is great, but how can you ensure they don't clobber each other in a multi-machine deployment?

Why do all CI pipelines suck?

April-09

I can't think of a better way to express this other than all existing CI/CD pipelines suck.

PHP Event Sourcing Makes Me Sad

March-11

I'm looking at starting a new project with Event Sourcing, and I just keep running into the same fatal flaw in every PHP implementation I can find. First reported by Fritz on the Prooph project, the Prooph people thought it was an unavoidable side-effect of using a document DB to store log information (it is, but that's beside the point).

Why are there no good HTTP status codes?

September-07

Why do all HTTP response codes suck for application development?

Django CMS doesn't work with Bootstrap 4 and flexbox layouts

June-21

I ran into a fundamental difference between flexbox and box-model layouts (bootstrap 3 vs bootstrap4). CSS grid layouts - as seen in frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation - use the rules of CSS to help layout and align parts of a Web page. Flexbox is fundamentally different from CSS grid systems because flexbox uses rules baked into the browser and not the cascading rules of CSS.

Is session ID enough for a CSRF token?

June-12

Can you use just the user's session ID as an anti-CSRF token? Let's break down CSRF tokens and how to create them.